There got to be too many of us, white people said, and why didn’t we go to Liberia where we belonged?

Ouida Sebestyen -- Words by Heart

Leaving Southampton, England on the 24th of July and arriving in Monrovia, Liberia on the 12th of September.

Alice Walker -- The Color Purple

I grant that this Liberia may have subserved all sorts of purposes, by being played off, in the hands of our oppressors, against us.

Harriet Beecher Stowe -- Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Planes arrived for Milo from airfields in Italy, North Africa and England, and from Air Transport Command stations in Liberia, Ascension Island, Cairo, and Karachi.

Joseph Heller -- Catch-22

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In Liberia, a neighbor would always look after her kids if she needed to leave them to run an errand or to visit a friend.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

BENEATHA: No, Mama—that’s Liberia.

Lorraine Hansberry -- A Raisin in the Sun

They purchased land in what was to become Liberia and paid to transport free blacks there.

Alexs Pate -- Amistad

My first impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia, to their own native land.

Richard Hofstadter -- Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Made Myth

One of the former slaves interviewed by the WPA was born in Liberia, captured there in the 1850s, and brought to Texas as a child.

Robert MacNeil and William Crane -- Do You Speak American?

She told me what she knew: While the Emperor was on a state visit to Liberia, a group of Imperial Bodyguard officers seized power during the night.

Abraham Verghese -- Cutting for Stone

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*t In 1820, the society to which I allude formed a settlement in Africa, upon the seventh degree of north latitude, which bears the name of Liberia.

Alexis de Toqueville -- Democracy In America, Volume 1

The only wars I knew of were those that I had read about in books or seen in movies such as Rambo: First Blood, and the one in neighboring Liberia that I had heard about on the BBC news.

Ishmael Beah -- A Long Way Gone

Half of the women in Sierra Leone endured sexual violence or the threat of it during the upheavals in that country, and a United Nations report claims that 90 percent of girls and women over the age of three were sexually abused in parts of Liberia during civil war there.

Nicholas D. Kristof -- Half the Sky

In Africa I was promised support by such men as Julius Nyerere, now President of Tanganyika; Mr. Kawawa, then Prime Minister of Tanganyika; Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia; General Abboud, President of the Sudan; Habib Bourguiba, President of Tunisia; Ben Bella, now President of Algeria; Modibo Keita, President of Mali; Leopold Senghor, President of Senegal; Sekou Toure, President of Guinea; President Tubman of Liberia; and Milton Obote, Prime Minister of Uganda.

Nelson Mandela -- I Am Prepared to Die

Doe was a member of the Krahn tribe, a tiny ethnic group that composed just 4 percent of the population, far less than the larger tribes in Liberia, the Gio and Mano.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

Liberia had been founded in 1821 by a group of Americans as a colony for freed slaves who lived there first under white American rule and then, in 1847, under their own authority, as Africa’s first self-governing republic.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

But he cleared his throat and said he only meant "native" to Liberia.

Alice Walker -- The Color Purple

The camp, home to more than twenty thousand refugees from the war in Liberia, was squalid, with frequent food shortages and a quiet threat in the form of soldiers who worked in the camp to recruit young men back into the war.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

Reports from Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, indicate that a bloodless coup has taken place while Emperor Haile Selassie was away on a state visit to Liberia.

Abraham Verghese -- Cutting for Stone

Fourteen years of civil war in Liberia—wars marked by unspeakable violence and cruelty—had taken their toll.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

What put Liberian refugees in Clarkston at special risk had to do with not just Liberia’s troubles but America’s as well.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

For a young man who had grown up in Liberia during the war, the leap to the world of American gangs was not a particularly big one.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

The two women—a soccer coach from Jordan, a widow from Liberia—found themselves teaming up to try to keep Mandela out of trouble.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

World Relief and the International Rescue Committee opened offices in Clarkston to better serve the newcomers, and resettled still more refugees—now from war-ravaged African countries including Liberia, Congo, Burundi, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

There were veteran players returning to each squad—Bien, Grace, and Jeremiah on the Under 13s, for example, Alex Nicishatse, Bien’s older brother, and Mandela Ziaty on the Under 15s, with team leaders Kanue Biah from Liberia and Natnael Mammo from Ethiopia.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

But the Reverend William B. J. K. Harris, a Liberian minister in Atlanta who reached out to the family after the fire, explained that during Liberia’s fourteen years of civil war, children were taught to take cover under their beds during the fighting, as a precaution against bullets and mortar shrapnel.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

Americo-Liberian rule came to a brutal end on April 12, 1980, when Samuel Doe, an army sergeant who had been trained by American Green Berets, stormed the presidential compound with soldiers, disemboweled President William Tolbert, and proclaimed himself Liberia’s new leader.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

Beatrice and Her Boys In 1997, at about the same time Luma was graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts, a woman named Beatrice Ziaty was struggling with her husband and sons—Jeremiah, Mandela, Darlington, and Erich—to survive in the middle of a civil war in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

Kanue was from Nimba County, in eastern Liberia, though his family fled the war there when he was just two years old, for refugee camps first in Ivory Coast and eventually Guinea.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

The boys came from Liberia, Kosovo, Sudan, Somalia, Burundi, Bosnia, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan, and while most spoke functional English, they had little in common with one another.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

If that goal was scored by a young refugee from Liberia, off an assist from a boy from southern Sudan, who was set up by a player from Burundi or a Kurd from Iraq—on a field in Georgia, U.S.A., no less—understanding its origins would mean following the thread of causation back in time to events that long preceded the first whistle.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

In the main service, immigrants and refugees from Togo, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Liberia, and Sudan, some in colorful native garb, worship alongside silver-haired white southern women in their Sunday best.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

After succeeding at getting their children out of the war in Liberia, they were now charged with saving them from another low-grade but still deadly conflict on the streets of the United States, their "safe haven."

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

I go to Liberia, not as an Elysium of romance, but as to a field of work.

Harriet Beecher Stowe -- Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The boys were from Kosovo, Bosnia, Liberia, Sudan, and Iraq.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

The settlement of Liberia is founded upon a lofty and a most fruitful idea; but whatever may be its results with regard to the Continent of Africa, it can afford no remedy to the New World.

Alexis de Toqueville -- Democracy In America, Volume 1

To fill up Liberia with an ignorant, inexperienced, half-barbarized race, just escaped from the chains of slavery, would be only to prolong, for ages, the period of struggle and conflict which attends the inception of new enterprises.

Harriet Beecher Stowe -- Uncle Tom’s Cabin

A teenager who’d left Liberia at the age of seven or eight for America—and who now spoke English fluently, had friends from around the world, and had been educated in American culture—was not Liberian exactly, or American.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

And for young, fatherless men, some of whom had been co-opted into violence themselves as child soldiers, or who certainly had brothers or friends who had fought, a gang—with its promise of power and authority amid economic and social dissolution—must’ve seemed an intensely familiar analog to the bands of fighters who roamed Liberia during the war.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

The stars of the Under 14 offense were a small, agile Eritrean refugee named Ashora, who had been referred to Luma after repeatedly acting out at school, and a tall, muscular center forward from Liberia named Luckie, who had a habit of commenting on the games from the field, in real time, in the manner of an excited television play-by-play announcer.

Warren St. John -- Outcasts United

If the colony of Liberia were so situated as to be able to receive thousands of new inhabitants every year, and if the negroes were in a state to be sent thither with advantage; if the Union were to supply the society with annual subsidies, *v and to transport the negroes to Africa in the vessels of the State, it would still be unable to counterpoise the natural increase of population amongst the blacks; and as it could not remove as many men in a year as are born upon its territory…

Alexis de Toqueville -- Democracy In America, Volume 1

But otherwise he was downright boastful and provided his inquisitive visitor a full picture of the fellowship’s worldwide operation, with approximately 20,000 lodges and 150 grand lodges, even reaching the cultures of Negro republics like Haiti and Liberia.

Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain

The most recent intelligence informs us that 2,500 negroes are collected there; they have introduced the democratic institutions of America into the country of their forefathers; and Liberia has a representative system of government, negro jurymen, negro magistrates, and negro priests; churches have been built, newspapers established, and, by a singular change in the vicissitudes of the world, white men are prohibited from sojourning within the settlement.